Codex Heinricus Pontarius

(Hænrīk Pontāri Codex)

The Codex Heinricus Pontarius is a late 9th Century manuscript discovered in the Croatian city of Split. The codex was discovered in 1998 inside a tomb on an archaeological site. The tomb was unearthed during restoration work of war damage caused by the Yugoslavian wars.

The codex is written in the Greek alphabet, but it was soon discovered to be not in Greek; it was found to be written in a hitherto unknown Germanic language of uncertain origin.

The author of the work identifies himself as Reginvaldus (Regnwald) Pontarius of Spalatum. It details events in the life of Saint Heinric of Spalatum. In the original language of the codex he is also called Hænrīk Pontāri. Although referred to as a saint, Saint Heinric is unmentioned in any of the known Catholic canons. The story has many of the stylistic attributes of a Germanic heroic saga. In the saga, Hænrīk travels to many locations in the Byzantine provinces of Dalmatia, Pannonia and Macedonia, battles pagan Croats and Bulgars, slays monsters and performs numerous miracles. The saga details that Hænrīk's heritage is of a line of pagan warlocks and although he performs miracles -- mostly of the martial kind, little mention is made of his Christian piety. The saga is recounted by the author, who describes himself as an old man at the time of writing. He states that he is inscribing the tales told to him by his grandfather, of his father Hænrīk's exploits. (i.e. Saint Hænrīk would have been Regnwald's great¬grandfather)

Page from the Codex Heinricus Pontarius, written in Old Quadian, in which Heinric Pontari of Spalatum details his kin and place of birth.

The codex is believed to have originally had 528 pages, although 3 quires of 16 pages each are missing. Of the surviving pages, 34 are severely damaged to the point of being illegible. Of the remaining pages, there are approximately 58,000 words legible. It is written in a modified Greek alphabet. It has been radio-carbon dated to 880 AD ±25 years. The style of Greek script used in the Codex generally concurs with this date. The age of other grave goods in the tomb and the skeleton of an elderly adult male are of similar antiquity.

The relationship of the language in the codex to other Germanic languages is uncertain. Attempts to categorize it as North, West or East Germanic have proved to be inconclusive. It displays a number of unique phonetic, grammatical and lexical innovations:*hw has evolved to [hj] In the codex, this is written with Greek Chi plus Iota. *þ has evolved to [ts]. The exact realization of this phoneme is uncertain but in the codex it is rendered with the Greek letter Zeta so was most likely pronounced as [ts] or [dz]. The *þ phoneme had obviously changed from its original Proto-Germanic sound, as otherwise Theta would seem a much more obvious choice of letter. The phonology shows in any case little influence of the High Germanic consonant shift.

Attempts to attribute the language as an evolution from Gothic or other East Germanic survivors have also been fruitless. The form of the word for egg for example ΑΙΙΟ (æjo) is more West Germanic in form. In the case of Class VII strong verbs, where Gothic had a very distinctive method for forming the preterite tenses by re-duplication, there is no evidence of this method being used at all. In sharp contrast to this, Class VII strong verbs appear to have been lost as a distinct class. All extant Class VII verbs have either become weak or been absorbed into other strong verb classes by analogy.

Verb infinitives end in -an which is fairly typical for Germanic languages. The verb for to be is wesan and appears to have evolved into a Class V strong verb, based on the stem *wez-. As such, it is far more regular than the verb for to be in any other known Germanic languages, which typically are a composite of several different roots for various tenses and persons.

The ethnic origin of the writer and of Saint Hænrīk is controversial. In one passage Hænrīk seeks refuge in a number of villages in Dalmatia with Germanic place names where the inhabitants are noted to still speak “…our old Kwedisk tongue”. (ΓΑΜΛΟ ΚΥΕΔΙΣΚΟ ΤΥΝΓΑ ΥΝΣΡΟ / gamlo kwedisko tunga unsro). Kwedisk suggests a link with the Quadi, a lesser Germanic tribe that lived north of the Danube at the time of Tacitus' Germania. The Germanic language of the codex has thus earned the names Kwedisk or Quadian.

The Codex also contains several short passages or phrases in Latin and Koine Greek. In some cases, these phrases are accompanied by translations into the Quadian language.

The location of the missing pages is not known, nor if there are any other copies of the codex in existence. However in 2012 there arose some tantalizing evidence that the missing quires or even a second copy have been sighted even if not at first hand. The research papers of Doctor Reinholt Stern, a professor of Germanic languages at Universität München, came to light after the death of his daughter in 2011.

Reinholt Stern was a known Nazi sympathizer during the Third Reich. His published works during that time were of dubious scientific value and appeared to be aimed at proving that, the origin of the Aryan languages was in Germany and that the Germanic languages and German in particular was the purist and least debased of the Indo-European languages. Professor Stern was a disgraced figure at the end of the Second World War.

His recently discovered research notes include an unpublished paper written the 1950s. It describes the journeys through the Mediterranean and the Balkans of a Seventeenth Century noble, Friederich Herzog von Memel. Baron Friederich did exist historically but his voyages appear to be a fiction of Reinholt Stern. Baron Friederich was allegedly an educated man, fluent in German, Latin and Italian and French. In Baron Friederich’s journeys, he encounters a maritime people living on both coasts of the Adriatic. The people, who belonged to two tribes or lineages were called the Kwasks and the Markmen.

The Kwasks and Markmen are said to be itinerant traders, spending more time on their small ships than ashore. There are said to mostly keep their homes on their boats but there were small enclaves of them living in many port cities and towns on the Adriatic coast. They plied trade routes in that area and occasionally sailed as far abroad as the Black Sea or the Barbary Coast. Some families were known to be pirates and raiders. Upon meeting them, Baron Friederich, was astounded to discover that the languages of the Kwasks and Markmen strongly resembled that of the Saxons and the Swedes. He noted that the languages were akin with German, but were closer in form to Low Saxon or Swedish than to High German. He had several conversations with literate persons, priests and lawyers. From this, with great enthusiasm and zeal, Baron Friederich assembled a list of common words -- this list had the majority of words in common with other Germanic languages. The baron also reveals that the Kwasks were nominally Roman Catholic and wrote their language in the Roman alphabet. The Markmen were nominally Eastern Orthodox and used a modified Cyrillic alphabet.

Professor Stern’s paper is most often considered to be a politically motivated hoax and languages of the Kwasks and Markmen to be examples of speculative a posteriori constructed languages. The primary source, being Baron Friederich’s diary is nowhere to be found. Apart from Professor Stern’s account of Baron Friederich’s journeys there is no mention in any other historical documents of people called Kwasks or Markmen living in that area at that time. But the most damning evidence of the hoax are Baron Friederich’s lists of words from Kwask and Markmennish. The supposed word lists, although not in exact order, were an exact match for the 207 vocabulary items used in a Swadesh list. Baron Friederich’s tale also bears a suspiciously strong resemblance to that of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Flemish noble who discovered and described Crimean Gothic.

Although an apparent hoax, what proved to be most tantalizing were the forms that Stern used for Kwask and Markmennish words. The form of many words looked to be as if they could have evolved out of the Quadian written in the Codex Heinric Pontarius. The two languages of the Kwasks and Markmen are obviously closely related and the form of many words show regular evolutionary relationships from Quadian words. In common with Quadian, Kwask and Markmennish show an evolution of *þ to [ts], and *hw has evolved to [h] in Kwask and [j] in Markmennish. The Codex Heinric Pontarius was not discovered until 1998, so should not have been seen by Stern. These circumstances give two possibilities; the first and most unlikely one that Baron Friederich’s account was not faked and Stern’s paper is not a hoax. The second more likely possibility is that Professor Stern had at some time already seen an unknown second copy or the missing fragments of the codex. A search of Stern’s archives has failed to find further signs of any other copy and the truth of the matter died with him in 1971.

After the discovery of Stern’s hoax, the credibility of the Split copy of the Codex was immediately called into question. Questions were raised whether it might be a fake planted in Split by Stern during the German occupation or by some unknown accomplice. But the molecular and chemical and archaeological evidence is that the codex does indeed date to the ninth century. Although there is a very real possibility that a second copy of the codex exists or until recently existed and Reinholt Stern’s hoax inadvertently revealed its existence.

But many questions remain; who were the the Kwedisk people of the codex, where did they live, where did they come from, when did they migrate to the Balkans and for how long did their Germanic language survive there?

See also: Swadesh List of Quadian, Kwask and Markmennish